Maori Movie—The UNM Department of Anthropology will be welcoming special guest Maori filmmaker Mereta Mita to town as part of the International Indigenous Film Festival. The New Zealand native will be on hand Thursday, March 4, at 7 p.m. to screen and discuss her feature-length drama Mauri. The film centers on the trauma of a disturbed Maori man who confronts his tragic deception with courage and humility. The screening will take place in the anthropology lecture hall, north of UNM's Maxwell Museum. Tickets are $12 at the UNM box offices or at Tickets.com outlets. You can also obtain tickets by calling the Anthropology department at 925-5858. Proceeds will benefit the UNM Anthropology Graduate Student Scholarship Fund.

Bertolucci takes us on a historical tour of sex and the cinema

By Devin D. O'Leary

At age 64, Bernardo Bertolucci (Stealing Beauty, The Sheltering Sky, The Last Emperor, 1900) is one of the last surviving members of the second generation, postwar filmmakers—those young lads from England, Italy, France, wherever, who grew up besotted by the product that Hollywood cranked out in the '30s and '40s. Throughout the '50s, educated young teens like Bertolucci, Casavettes, Godard, Antonioni, Pasolini, Fellini, Truffaut were raised on a steady diet of Ford, Capra, Hawks, Hitchcock, Lang, Keaton, Welles. The works these “New Wave” directors eventually produced were part homage, part angry response. But unlike the filmmakers of the earlier generation, whose only point of artistic reference was the legitimate theater, the postwar filmmakers of the '60s and '70s were all about the silver screen.

Son's quest to understand father's love is built to last

By Devin D. O'Leary

Last Sunday, My Architect lost out to Fog of War at the Academy Awards in the Best Documentary Feature category. Their inclusion in the 76th Annual Academy Awards was not the only similarity between the two films, however. Both are cinematic portraits struggling to define controversial historical figures. Fog of War is certainly the splashier of the two, since the figure in question (Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara) is far more controversial, and he's still alive to explain himself. My Architect, on the other hand, is far more personal, tracing the journey of filmmaker Nathaniel Kahn to understand his long-dead father, famed architect Louis I. Kahn.